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adeelarshad82 writes "The oriental hornet is more active during the day, and tends to become even more active as the temperature rises. And now scientists have discovered the reason: the hornets are solar powered. It turns out that the distinctive yellow stripe on the hornet's abdomen is actually full of tiny protrusions that gather sunlight and harness it for energy. The insect also features a special pigment, called xanthopterin, that helps with the process."

I don't know but if they are anything like the wasps we get in the south they are sure pissy during the day, maybe the extra energy makes them grouchy? I'd love to know what kind it is we get around here because the wiki says southern wasps are about a half inch long, but especially around farms we get these really big bastards that live in holes in the ground and I swear are bigger around than a man's thumb and SERIOUSLY bad tempered! They are heavy enough I have seen them make ping dents on the hood of a

You're either talking European [wikipedia.org] Hornets [pestworld.org] or Cicada killers [wikipedia.org]. European hornets have the odd characteristic of banging against windows at night, trying to get at the light inside. We call them "Buck Hornets" in Central Virginia. Contrary to popular belief, their sting isn't too different from a normal wasp.

Cicada killers [wikipedia.org] are also very large, but are very unlikely to sting you (females can but are reluctant to do so, males are incapable).

Well the size looks about right, but on both of those they say they are very NON aggressive, and the AR farm wasps are just the opposite: Those suckers have NO problem tearing you a new ass if you get close to their nests, especially during dog days, which is late July to late August. The ones around here have also been seen (inculding with my very own peepers) engaging is "wars" where if two groups covet a particular nesting ground they will tear into each other.

Since xanthopterin converts light directly into electricity, according to the research, what exactly does the wasp do with the electricity produced? Does it directly excite muscles? Is there a tiny capacitor in the abdomen that dumps the energy into pulling the wings down?

Since xanthopterin converts light directly into electricity, according to the research, what exactly does the wasp do with the electricity produced? Does it directly excite muscles? Is there a tiny capacitor in the abdomen that dumps the energy into pulling the wings down?

Presumably it would use the electrons generated in a redox [wikipedia.org] reaction which generate ATP [wikipedia.org] which is the basic power supply of the cell.

Of course, this is all very hypothetical and hand waving at this point. However, if real, it could be a Big Deal - now you have another molecule, aside from the chlorophyll complex that can take photons and use them in cellular reactions. Photosynthesis is quite a bit more efficient that photovoltaic cells - assuming that this really does produce electrons at the end of the reaction and it's similarly efficient, or even just easier to copy / clone / manipulate, we might yet have a decent solar to electricity system.

Cloning the power cells would be interesting, and was the first thing I thought of when I saw it, too. I'm sure they could find the genes to splice to produce the xanthopterin in another organism, such as a conveniently non-flying and non-stinging pine tree. But without the insect's sophisticated chitin structure to collect the energy I suspect much of it would be wasted; and that's only if there's enough light energy to start the reaction at all.

Only in sunlight driven systems, just FYI, following the stated source. In targeted wavelength systems, this is absolutely nowhere near the case.

In LED driven systems, photosynthetic efficiency jumps double to nearly quadruple that, tested over and over again in multiple of my systems. We can push it as far as nearly 50% efficiency before we hit maximum saturation if we pulse the light instead of a solid steady output.

See, what mainly limits efficiency is the rate at which chlorophyll degrades and regenerates. When it processes energy, it rips itself apart and gets rebuilt. This is how light bleaching happens, too much light, too much photosynthesis, the plant can't regenerate chlorophyll as fast as it's producing energy, and it 'burns' out.

Stop relying upon wikipedia. It's so outdated as of now for my field of research that they might as well delete the entire section from their site.

AbstractThe Oriental hornet worker correlates its digging activity with solar insolation. Solar radiation passes through the epicuticle, which exhibits a grating-like structure, and continues to pass through layers of the exo-endocuticle until it is absorbed by the pigment melanin in the brown-colored cuticle or xanthopterin in the yellow-colored cuticle. The correlation between digging activity and the ability of the cuticle to absorb part of the solar radiation implies that the Oriental hornet may harvest

The yellow energy absorbing area on the "end" of the wasp is known as the "fat body" apparently the converted energy stimulates the metabolism of fat causing the wasp to do more work. The majority of fat on this wasp is stored here. FTA:

Until now, insects were thought to perform metabolism in an organ known as the fat body, which performs a similar function to the human liver.
Most of the fat body is in an insect's abdomen surrounding the gut, where it can quickly take up absorbed nutrients, though some is

Since xanthopterin converts light directly into electricity, according to the research, what exactly does the wasp do with the electricity produced?

The article speculates that it gives them digging energy. I'm going to be more conservative here, and postulate that it only gives them an innate sense of direction and sun intensity. All bees/wasps need to be good navigators, and since these guys dig, they'll be better off digging when the ground is somewhat dry so they don't get buried in mud tunnel collapse

You know, every time someone says anything about a platypus, I find myself thinking "WTF?".

Egg laying mammal, with a bill, fur, a tail like a beaver, poisonous venom in a foot spike... and now electrolocation [wikipedia.org].

I swear, it really is the most bizarre of critters I can imagine. If there is a god, and he did create everything... the platypus was created immediately after a heavy dose of mescaline or something! It's like a collection of spare p

Every example we have creates electricity, and it is probably a requirement, since the light interferes only with electrons... Maybe there is an organism that does it purely by chemical reactions, but every one I'm aware of turns the light into electricity (on a stable molecule), conduct it to some other place (a molecule that changes form) and use that later place to make some endotermic reaction happen.

"Previous studies have shown diffusion potential across thecuticle, with the inside negative with respect to the outside.Digby (1965) has suggested that electrons move through thesemiconductive cuticular layer. This process creates calciumcarbonate that precipitates in the cuticle. In conclusion, wehave presented evidence supporting the hypothesis that theOriental hornet has evolved a cuticle design to harvest sol

Oh, interesting, sorry for the mis-labeling then. It worked for me, but I'm on a campus that subscribes to Springer journals, which are usually paywalled, so I assumed it was paywalled.

It looks like Naturwissenschaften is part of a "Springer OpenChoice" program where authors can choose to make their paper open-access by paying Springer $3,000, which these authors must've done I guess? I rarely see anyone pay those fees in my field (computer science), but I've heard that in biology grants are more willing to pay such fees.

The scientific literature world is pretty strange. Usually you pay around 90$ per page to get your article published in a paid journal. The journal doesn't have to do much for that. The reviewers work for free so they only have to send some letters around and do the typesetting. To have the article 'in the open' you pay a staggering 3000$ for which they do nothing! Amazing

The scientific literature world is pretty strange. Usually you pay around 90$ per page to get your article published in a paid journal. The journal doesn't have to do much for that. The reviewers work for free so they only have to send some letters around and do the typesetting. To have the article 'in the open' you pay a staggering 3000$ for which they do nothing! Amazing

That's pretty short-sighted. I've helped building a system for a well-known publisher which "sends some letters around" as you so succinctly describe. We've worked for it for two years, with a 10+ people team at the project peak.

They don't have to do it for free, considering the outrageous fees they collect for subscriptions to their journals. The way I see it, having a popular scientific journal is just raking in money. But maybe someone can convince me that that is not the case.

The Oriental hornet has a unique ability to harvest solar energy, scientists have discovered.

Not true. Many marine organisms use Zooanthella [wikipedia.org] to harvest solar energy. This is why a number of corals and anemone are very difficult to keep in marine aquariums - the spectrum and power of artificial light has to be "just right" otherwise the organisms eject their zooantehlla cells and as a result starve to death over the following weeks or months.

Not true. Many marine organisms use Zooanthella to harvest solar energy. This is why a number of corals and anemone are very difficult to keep in marine aquariums - the spectrum and power of artificial light has to be "just right" otherwise the organisms eject their zooantehlla cells and as a result starve to death over the following weeks or months.

It's worth noting here that this is a symbiotic relationship between two species. It appears that the hornets may have a novel mechanism that isn't the result of symbiosis.

This will clearly have influence on future solar power research. I know that there are research groups trying to use insights from plant photosynthesis for building solar cells, and having another natural system that is not plant (or bacterium) based will inspire a lot of new work.

One of the things that is most interesting is the nano-structures that are used to make light gathering more efficient. Understanding these structures could
improve the efficiency of existing solar power collectors. With current genetic techniques it might even be possible to grow these structures, and perhaps even used grown material in real world applications.

Another point is that the wasp's collection structures are yellow, not green like plant chlorophyll. The green color results from chlorophyll not using green light, but absorbing more blue end light. If the wasps look yellow, that might mean that they are efficient in a different part of the visible light spectrum.

Maximum efficiency of a solar panel is achieved when it is black (harvesting all visible light frequencies, and possibly UV/IR), so I don't see the point of making a yellow panels because we found yellow hornets.

I have absolutly no amount of expertise in this, but I would guess that the yellow pigments are chosen because yellow is a color of warning. Maybe it also suffers from less photodegradation as well? A combination of the two possibly makes yellow the ideal choice. I dunno, but either way I'm guess it has something to do with how yellow pigments react to light.

I have absolutly no amount of expertise in this, but I would guess that the yellow pigments are chosen because yellow is a color of warning. Maybe it also suffers from less photodegradation as well? A combination of the two possibly makes yellow the ideal choice. I dunno, but either way I'm guess it has something to do with how yellow pigments react to light.

From our perspective, we (humans) chose yellow as a color of warning because there were lots of nasty critters with yellow/red on them that killed us. Well, technically, that killed other people while we (as a species) watched, since the dead make very few social color recommendations.

Ideas, yes (e.g. use of patterned capture surfaces, possible multiple reflections to increase the efficiency of a cell? Maybe not quite new).

New materials? The full text [springerlink.com] version of the article (posted by someone above), mentions a measured the conversion efficiency of a xanthopterin-sensitized TiO2 solar cell to 0.335% - clearly some more work needs to be done (e.g. other substate to senzitize?).

"Another point is that the wasp's collection structures are yellow, not green like plant chlorophyll. The green color results from chlorophyll not using green light, but absorbing more blue end light. If the wasps look yellow, that might mean that they are efficient in a different part of the visible light spectrum."

That reminds me of the time I was a college freshman and, during orientation, saw some woman giving a presentation. I've forgotten most of it by now (including the original purpose of it all),

One thing that puzzles me about this claim is that the light absorbing area is a relatively small part of the abdomen. If one looks at trees, you see that the leaves grow in a way that collects light rather well, with a high surface area for the infrastructure (stem, trunk, roots, etc) involved.

Given that this is Slashdot and we're obligated by the terms of the EULA to speculate obsessively on such things, I have a few guesses. I'll assume here that the research turns out to be true (and that there's som

Genetic engineering to utilize melanin to produce ATP would create natural evolutionary pressure to make humans darker colored, which might piss off certain "Ethnic purity" [cough, sputter] groups, but considering that being darkly colored is widely considered normal, and even attractive, I don't see this as being a problem.

Until now, insects were thought to perform metabolism in an organ known as the fat body, which performs a similar function to the human liver.
Most of the fat body is in an insect's abdomen surrounding the gut, where it can quickly take up absorbed nutrients, though some is scattered elsewhere."We have found that the main metabolic activity in the Oriental hornet is actually in the yellow pigment layer," says Dr Plotkin.

The full-text article [springerlink.com], makes no mention of the "fat body" and doesn't get a hint by what reasoning this conclusion is to be derived?
The correlation between sunny conditions and hornet's digging activity is not quite a strong indication to me - I mean: ants are most active when the weather is hot, yet they apparently don't relly on capturing the solar radiation.

I think the best way to think of an animal vs plant argument is something like this:An animal can move anywhere it wants, independent of the ground below it.A plant, however, is stuck to the ground it was born in. If it were to leave the ground, it would almost certainly die.Very simplistic, but it covers everything i can think of.

Most algae would have difficulty with that classification. As would most basement dwellers, for that matter.

And in evolution, the innovations are few and far between with millions of crackpot ideas that never turn out right happening all the time (i.e. genetic defects). And it's no use saying "Hey, solar is there, let's use it!" because evolution doesn't work like that. It takes a completely random chance for an extraordinary event to happen that confers a significant advantage to the creature involved such that it will stand more chance of mating and passing said effect onwards (or at least, not detrimentally

Now dramatic changes in evolution are easier in organism with few cells or even single cells, these organisms do tend to "pirate" genes or features from their prey, that how eukaryotic life captured mitochondria for instance, unless there's a reason preventing bacteriophages from absorbing chloroplasts or the like, I would have assumed such thing has already happened.

So I'm nowhere saying that evolution has to bend to my will, I'm asking, why didn't it happen? My guess